Either one accomplishes much the same effect by adjusting the (apparent) color temperature of your screen depending on time of day. It distorts colors, if you fancy yourself a photographer, but your eyes will thank you.
In psychology grad school, I learned that a single blue photon hitting the back of the is sufficient to cause a measurable shift in melatonin output. Note: measurable is not the same as deleterious, but flux doesn't even eliminate all the blue light your computer is putting out, let alone the other sources in your house.
The only solution, baring blacking out all your windows, or removing all modern light sources from your house, or replacing them all with red lights, is 0.3-0.5 mg of melatonin a few hours before bed. Note: it's sold in the stores in 5 mg tablets - an order of magnitude too much.
Most of the range of "alerting" light for humans is between 11-14 log photons/sec/cm^2, so one photon is sort of an enormously huge understatement.
For sleeping, it is good to be in a dark room, but for winding down, you won't mess yourself up with dim light.
Also, I think it may be poor advice for most people to take melatonin except for "shifting the clock" e.g., jetlag. Seeing extra light in the morning is enough to entrain the clock for most people.
I was actually bothered by the uneven distortion so I created multiple display profiles with a monitor calibrator at different color temperatures and then wrote a simple tool to load them at the appropriate time: https://github.com/stefantalpalaru/iccloader
I have the Uvex S1933X glasses, and they're amazing. I have pretty cool LED lighting in my apartment and can make my whole living room any color I want at night. If I set in to pure blue and put on the glasses, it's like being in pitch blackness (except a couple of items glow brightly).
It's not like looking at things with an orange tint at all, even though the glasses are obviously orange.
That being said - the benefits I get by using them is amazing. It's weird how much of a difference it can make, I get tired quickly after putting them on in the evening. If I forget to put them on I usually end up staying up too late, getting too little sleep and often ruining the next day. Personally I find it way more effective than flux.
By the way - blue light isn't just a negative thing, but also a huge positive. In the morning I use a Philips goLITE BLU HF3332, and it really improves both my energy and mood quickly after just a few minutes of usage.
Those two simple items, a blue light and a pair of blue-blocking glasses, have improved my life significantly. Try it out (especially the glasses, it's just $9).
I started wearing orange tinted glasses about a week or two ago, and I have noticed that they help me feel more tired when I'm trying to fall asleep. However it could just be a placebo. The downside is that I can't do any design work while wearing them, and programming is more difficult because code coloring is really off in Sublime. If I continue to wear them, I'll probably have to change my Sublime theme to something that's easier to distinguish.
Maybe that's a positive. If you're supposed to be winding down for bed, those are two activities you really shouldn't be doing.
Prior to wearing Gunnars, I'd often have headaches by 4 pm and my eyes felt dry and quite tired. I was sceptical in the beginning, but these things do help.
Easily the best $140 that I spent on ergonomics.
Link:
http://www.jins-jp.com/jins-pc/
If I search in English, most of the search results are spammy companies selling what look like sunglasses for computer use (e.g. google "compuer glasses"). These are obviously tinted. But these Jins "PC Megane" do not look tinted, or only faintly so. Jins will put these lenses in any frame.
I wanted these the last time, but for my astigmatism it would have required a 1 week order, and I was flying out of Japan sooner than that.
I also noticed a similar functionality in one of the latest CyanogenMod (CM12) - under "Settings -> Display & Light -> LiveDisplay" - you can adjust colour temps too for day and night times. Not sure if it takes lat & long into account.
